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Cheeni Rao

Amy R. Andrews

How’s Your Relationship With the Monkey God?

When Cheeni Rao hit bottom, he turned to Hanuman.

By Anne Ford

April 30, 2009

As a toddler, Srinivas “Cheeni” Rao was snatched out of a car’s path by a stranger who delivered him to the arms of his terrified mother, touched her cheek, and vanished. “She often says she knew it was a god,” Rao says. “The moment he touched her, she knew.”

Specifically, she believed he was Hanuman, the Hindu monkey deity. And Rao, 35, now believes it was far from the last time that Hanuman would intervene to keep him safe. “There have been a lot of times in my life where I did some seriously crazy shit,” says Rao, whose new memoir, In Hanuman’s Hands, was issued by HarperOne this month, “and I don’t know how I escaped”—unless it was with the god’s help.

Rao grew up in Schaumburg and Burr Ridge, a bright but troubled Indian-American kid steeped in Hinduism and tightly bound by family and cultural expectations. He remembers his father telling him to ask his teachers for more work. His sister, he says, was sent to India to live with relatives for the offense of receiving a phone call from a boy. (She was allowed to come back here once she was safely married).

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At Lyons Township High School, he was “an exceptional student, the top of my class, an athlete,” Rao says. But what he describes in his memoir as his “Indian immigrant high-achiever mask” covered up “two suicide attempts in high school, my nighttime addiction to breaking and entering houses, [and] that I’d burned my neighbor’s house down in a fit of rage.” Maybe it was Hanuman who miraculously kept him out of jail. Then again, maybe, he says, it was looking “like the kind of kid who would never, ever do anything wrong.”

The mask dropped entirely when Rao began dealing and using drugs, including crack, shortly after enrolling at Williams College in Massachusetts. Kicked out of school in 1995, he ended up back in Chicago. His family wouldn’t take him in—his mother told him, “I can do nothing for you. You are now in Hanuman’s hands.” He bounced between rehab and the streets before finally getting clean and sober with the help of Oasis, a Ravenswood halfway house.

What kept him alive at his lowest moments—eating out of Dumpsters, sleeping on the el, snatching purses and prostituting himself for dime bags—was a benevolent internal voice that he interprets as Hanuman’s. The god’s voice sustained him, he believes, in the same way that, in the Ramayana, Hanuman helps the exiled Lord Rama defeat his enemies and recover his kidnapped wife. “There were a lot of times on the street when that myth was percolating within me as a way of understanding what was going on,” Rao says. “Instead of saying, ‘I am forever fucked,’ I was saying, ‘This is my exile. I will come back.’”

And he did. Within a few years of completing rehab, Rao had reconciled with his family, earned his bachelor’s degree at the University of Chicago, and enrolled at the University of Iowa’s prestigious Writers’ Workshop. By the time he graduated with his MFA in 2000, his life seemed to be back on course. He’d gotten married and forged a personal spirituality for himself that incorporated both Hinduism and the precepts of recovery. He’d launched an editing business, the Iowa Book Doctors.

Then, in 2001, everything seemed to go to shit again. He says his hard drive crashed, taking with it a novel he’d nearly finished but had never backed up. Hepatitis C landed him in the hospital. And in 2002, his wife left him for someone else. “After feeling as if I’d rebuilt my life, it was like I was all alone again,” he says.

Ironically, this time daylight came in the form of a chance to write about his darkest hours. Rao had already developed some of what would become In Hanuman’s Hands while at Iowa. Now a writer friend, J.C. Hallman, looked at it and sent it to his agent at the time, Giles Anderson, who expressed interest. With that support, Rao began working on the book in earnest. Painful as it was to dredge up the memories, it was reassuring to have a purpose, he says. “There were times when I was suicidal, and I’d say to myself, ‘Make this be the one thing you do with your life, at least.’”

Since then, things have started looking up again for Rao, who now lives in Iowa City, running his editing business and working on a collection of short stories and a novel he describes as “my take on terrorism.” And, even as he guesses that he’ll never be fully free from addiction, he says that completing In Hanuman’s Hands has given him at least some sense of closure. “In the editing process, it felt like I was finally putting a lot of my past behind me. And then, having the finished book in front of me—it’s like, ‘OK, that’s that.’”   

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